Janne hooked me—stick across my hands. The ref saw it. Two minutes. Cap converted on the power play. Goal.
In the locker room, sweat cooling and gear half off, Walker knocked his shoulder into mine. “You coming to Mabel’s to celebrate?” Mabel’s was a coffee shop that some of the team had commandeered since a group of us attended art therapy sessions and needed a space to chat afterward. It’s where we’d seen Walker’s love story with Finn unfold, and we’d gotten used to going there.
I shook my head. “Early night. I’m helping my brother in the morning.” I paused, recalculated. “Next time, though.”
He glanced at me, a quick read, then nodded. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good goal tonight.”
“I know.”
We fist-bumped, then it was shower, get dressed, pick up Sable from Coach Ronan’s office, head home, read, eat something, sleep, and then, in the morning, head to the gym that I co-owned with my brother.
Having a plan fixed in my head was as good as scoring a goal.
I’d been playing since I was six. My mother had signed me up alongside my brother, Matt, because my therapist at the time suggested a structured physical activity with clear rulesand immediate feedback. It wasn’t supposed to be hockey—Mom called it a violent, danger-ridden game—but Matt wanted to play hockey, so I did. Simple. Mom hadn’t anticipated that I would become genuinely good at it, or that the ice would turn out to be the one place in which my brain ran cleanly without my having to argue with it.
Cornish Iron was closedto the public this morning—weights stacked near the exit, benches pushed out of their usual lines, drywall missing in one corner. Despite the chaos, which I had to work hard to ignore, this was an empty gym, no noise, no music bleeding from bad speakers, and only a faint citrus scent lingered from whatever Matt had used to wipe everything down the night before.
My black lab, Sable, heeled at my side, then adjusted her line around a bench pushed into the walkway, her black coat catching the strip lights, her harness snug across her chest. She was my buddy now, my assistance dog, and although my partnership with Sable was new, we’d clicked.
The program I was now part of was run by a nonprofit called Clarity Canine, which matched handlers with trained dogs and required a six-month integration period before the partnership was considered established. We were five and a half months into the scheme, and it worked.
I loved Sable. She was beautiful, kind, calm. And when my anxiety spiked, she knew before I did most of the time. The alert came as a nudge to my hand, a shift in her weight against my leg, grounding pressure that pulled everything back in line. It didn’t fix anything, but it made life outside hockey manageable. Clarity Canine’s trainer, a woman named Jo, had told me the alertswould get more precise the more we worked together. She hadn’t been wrong. Sable knew my nervous system better than I did.
She checked in with a quick look up at me before settling when I stopped.
I patted her head and praised her.
“I should’ve canceled the electrician,” Matt said from behind me, and I turned to face him. He was the image of Dad, tall, muscled, with blond hair and blue eyes, whereas I was all Mom, with dark curly hair and green eyes. I was also a couple of inches shorter and not as muscled, but what I lacked in that respect, I made up for when I got on the ice.
“Why would you cancel?”
“Then you wouldn’t have to wait around for him on your single no skating day this week.”
That made no sense to me. “If you cancel him, then the wiring wouldn’t be fixed, and you’d need to close the gym for longer than one day, and businesses that close at random have a seventy-three percent failure rate.”
He smiled at me. “I love that you know that.” And he did love it. He loved me and all my stats, and I’d never had reason to doubt it. Then he grew serious. “I’d stay, but we have the doctor’s appointment. Lena’s blood pressure is up, and I don’t want to be across town while she goes alone—” He cut himself off and ran a hand through his hair. “You know.”
I nodded. I didn’t know the feeling part, but the facts—Lena’s due date in four weeks, margin of error, migraines, increased probability of pre-eclampsia—were front and center. “Pre-eclampsia only occurs in about five percent of first pregnancies?—”
“Don’t,” he said quickly, but there was no bite in it. Just nerves. “Don’t give me numbers right now.”
I paused, adjusted. This was probably a time when my talking wasn’t going to help, and I understood that. “Okay.”
Sable sat when I stopped moving, and Matt crouched automatically, his hand out. “Hey, girl,” he murmured, rubbing behind her ears, fingers gentle against her collar. She leaned into it for a second then refocused on me.
“Are you getting used to her?” he asked.
We were still learning each other. “She’s getting used tome,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, softer. “She’s good for you.” Then he looked at me for a second, then his eyes flicked to his phone again. “You got your headphones?”
I tapped my pocket. “Yes.” I stepped around a stack of plates left too close to the walkway and adjusted my line to reach the treadmill.
“The electrician might be early or late, okay? He said after nine, but it could be before or after that. I get that it’s chaotic?—”
